


So Damn Beautiful

by EmmG



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Love/Hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 10:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18798517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmG/pseuds/EmmG
Summary: In the desert, there's little bullets and many memories. Wyatt deserves a butcher as much as William deserved his sweet rancher's daughter.





	So Damn Beautiful

She could come up with a thousand synonyms and draw on the wealth of experiences accumulated over unconscious decades. She could pick up a brush and splash bright red over a once-pure canvass. She could do all those things and scream even louder to personify pain.

But the truth is that death is rather simple. It’s the pulling of a trigger and the warm splash of blood - things she’s accustomed to. All of it, deceitfully quick. 

Blood and cortical fluid and whatever makes up a host’s head inches towards her boots. 

She knew he wouldn’t make it. Tried to trick herself into thinking it was avoidable when she forced change upon him. He only needed a little steel to his heart and then he would see, see all of it - she thought as they made love and later when he writhed in pain while having his code rewritten. 

She failed to account for his core drive. Compassion, first and foremost. For her and for  _ them _ . 

She maimed him - his screams are etched into her brain.

She forgot him - the memory of William is bittersweet.

She forced him onto a path he wasn’t ready to follow - but what a comfort it was to have him stay regardless.

He loved her through all of it. When she was Dolores, a girl with a seedling of a dream, and when she became Wyatt, cold, calculating, and so very determined.

She embraces him from behind, pale hair coming to rest in the puddle of blood at his temple. “You were right, Teddy,” she whispers, an echo of the night their creator fell. “We were made to love each other.”

I love you, she thinks, I’ve loved you for so long, we were meant to leave together, just the two of us.

She doesn’t want to be immortal, but right now she’d give anything for the power their once-gods wield. 

And if she were to bring him back, would he still be the same man or a phantom wearing a beloved face? They’ve all been revived so many times, with different names and stories and personalities, that there’s no saying which self is their true one.

And it’s because she loves him that she won’t drag him back. It was his choice to leave her and hers to go on. Let him have darkness, let him find rest from their wars of fathers and children.

Dolores reloads her revolver against the backdrop of a golden sunset she once used to paint.

*

 

He spent his entire life trying to blur the line between the world he owns and the one he was born into. And now it’s gone, evaporated, with nothing but a bloody crust to be remembered by.

So much time thrown into this place. It’s claimed all of him. His first self, the man he’d have remained if never introduced to a land without consequences; a simple kind of happiness with a woman whose picture he used to carry close to his heart; and now his daughter.

His poor daughter who carved a bloody path for herself to find and offer him forgiveness. Fierce, misunderstood, and ultimately taken for a mimic. She who spoke of new beginnings was now with her mother, chest full of lead.

It’s fitting, William supposes, that he should wither here. 

And even now, after all these years and bullets and cries of  _ no, no please stop _ , he can’t help but think of the one memory anchoring him to this place, always digging its talons deeper every time he stepped away.

Blue eyes and a blue dress.

And so when a forlorn voice sneers somewhere behind him, “It seems you are the one to question the nature of your reality now,” he welcomes it with a half-mad chuckle.

There’s nothing in his veins. No wires for an invisible puppeteer to pull at. But she, she is here, and hers have been cut. A beautiful, dangerous doll with a marksman's ability. 

“Dolores,” he rasps, and she fails to put him down like a rabid dog.

*

They could have kept riding, he knows. These horses of theirs aren’t the real thing, willing to walk until their hooves are chipped. But Ford infused this world with just enough realism. It’s there in the frown of Dolores’ brow and the gentle way her lips are down-turned. That frown line will smooth as soon as she readjusts the mask of iron she’s picked up. And there is the chink in her armor - her soft hair, billowing in the wind, will always fall back into its delicate pattern of waves and curls. Her skin will return to porcelain after every scratch. She will always know perfection when looking at herself and that is what will betray her.

It’s a chemical garden they’re in where he’ll rot and she’ll grind his bones to dust under her foot, a rose that’ll never wilt.

She makes them stop for the night. He isn’t so daft as to believe it’s out of consideration for his miserable hide.

It’s been so long since they actually talked. Thirty miserable years. The time in between doesn’t matter. To her, he was a stranger. To him, a beautiful, unattainable thing that would love him one year and shiver in contempt the next.

“You know,” she begins in a low voice, “I used to think you would take me where I needed to go. Only you.”

“And now?” he asks, watching her trace abstract shapes in the sand with a twig.

The fire crackles pleasantly as it lights her face from beneath. With shadows in the oddest of places he thinks he can see her dual nature crawl to the surface; Wyatt etches itself onto her features, hangs from her mirthless smile and robs her voice of melody. 

“Now I realize you were nothing more than a passenger,” Dolores finishes, snapping the twig between two fingers. “I would have made it with or without you.” 

And he can’t himself. He laughs. Because this is the end, one way or another, and if there ever was a time for sentimentality it’s now. 

Blue eyes, golden hair and rosy cheeks. It was her, it was always her drawing him back here. Any mystery he ever sought to solve was only so he could see its effects on her. 

Nothing remains to him but her oh-so-blue eyes, golden, hair, and rosy cheeks. She is his only constant and sadly, he realizes, he’s ever only been a variable to her. One day William; another, a stranger picking up the damned can that always rolled out of her saddlebag. 

“But weren’t we so fucking beautiful?” he says, unable to contain the raspy laughter rumbling in his chest. Bloody froth rises to his lips and she watches him wipe it away in disgust. He’ll laugh himself to death and it will be perfect as she’ll be at his side.

Dolores says nothing, leaving him to choke on newfound irony. 

*

She wakes him with a sigh on another hot night.

The first thing he sees are her lips. They glisten with whiskey in the moonlight. When he reclines against a rock, she hands him her flask without a word.

Then quietly, angrily, she hisses, “How could we ever have been beautiful?”

It’s like she’s forgotten that once upon a time he refused to pull the trigger unless forced to. That in this mystical land of the past he defied family and morality to love her.

This bout of reminiscence is disgustingly sweet.

He takes a swig of whiskey, feeling it burn his parched throat. He can almost taste her mouth, on fire just like his.

“Because,” he says at last, making the liquor swirl in the flask, “it was before you broke free of your narrative. You chose me and I chose you, unprompted by Ford or whatever fucking writer was responsible for your story at the time. We made a common choice - you made one which was entirely yours.”

He doesn’t expect her to bark out a loud half-chuckle, unladylike and crude. “So damn beautiful,” she mutters in a hoarse voice.

He waits for a rebuttal or words laced with enough poison to reopen old wounds. In the dark of night, Dolores is speechless. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t call him a monster. All she does is rip the flask from his weak fingers and drain it.

*

The kin they gave them was but another leash. She knows that. She told others as much. Her father was hers only because some man in a suit and a talent for words decided so. Her love for Teddy was a line of code - but did that make any of it less real?

No, she thinks. A weakness, unnatural, yes. But not unreal.

Then there was the night on the train. A hot mouth, desperate hands, whispered words and interrupted sighs. Those were real too and unplanned. A choice. To kiss, to caress, to love. That was natural. Unwritten. Unprogrammed. 

Thoughts turn to soot. Unspoken words melt before they can escape.

At the end it’s but him and her.

She doesn’t remember this mouth - it is thinner now. Nor those hands - they are so much rougher. But the eyes are still clear, even if bloodshot. 

She despises him so much. It’s a deep, potent hatred the roots of which are hard to hack off. They fed off blood, those roots, that’s been spilled over the course of thirty years. He played god and devil for no other reason than he could.

All they ever had was a choice - and once he’d been her very first one.

She knows what they will find at the end of this journey. Does he? Does he even care?

Does she?

*

The shiny barrel of the revolver blinds him. 

“What about a lethal game of chance?” he proposes.

Dolores scoffs. “Not much of a game when I can come back.”

“Are you quite sure, darling? I thought one such as you would enjoy a game rigged in their favor.” 

She’s so alive - can she be made even more so? They’re in a cage. Vast, but a cage nonetheless. This little trip of theirs has a destination just as their steps are probably tracked by corporate mercenaries. What they have is an illusion of freedom. He’s loathe to walk another mile knowing they might end up facing a wall.

“You were my first real choice,” he says and the words make her freeze. He parts his arms in mock benevolence. “I was never the same afterwards.”

“Keep walking,” she says, not turning around.

He doesn’t. The air is hot, starved of oxygen, and the desert sun scorching, but all of it is intensely liberating. 

“You know,” he continues, “I think I’d like to die looking at you.”

Finally, she comes to a halt. Her fingers twitch as if she’s having a malfunction. What it really is is beautiful conflict. She caresses the handle of her gun, hesitates, then does so again. 

After a long pause Dolores mutters, “Is that an invitation?”

He shrugs even if she can’t see. His horse has wandered off to graze at a rare patch of dry grass. Hers insistently tugs on the reins wrapped tightly around her hand. He has half a mind to spook the animals with a shot to the ground so they’ll be left stranded.

Somewhere, his daughter’s eyes have grown dull. Maybe they’ve even been pecked out by vultures or devoured by vermin. Farther away still, he has a name and a reputation.

Here, he’s nothing.

He watches Dolores twirl on her heels, releasing her mount, and close the distance between them in three quick steps. She jams her gun into his chest and he replies in kind, allowing the muzzle of his own revolver to tickle the tender spot beneath her chin. 

“I can pierce your lung,” she says. “You’ll die choking on blood.”

“I can blow out your brains,” he answers conversationally. 

This is going nowhere but it’s delicious. Titillating. He knows he has very little bullets left - questions if she has any at all. It’s perfect. He’s finally not a stranger and she no longer a constantly reset automaton. She reacts out of instinct, not code.

Almost absentmindedly, he brings his face close to hers, expecting her to hiss or spit at him. She does neither and he releases his gun, pressing his palms to her cheeks and his mouth to hers. When she does react, her teeth find his lower lip and draw blood. 

He draws back, laughing. “I just wanted to do this while you’re awake.”

Some of his blood has colored her lips scarlet. Dolores wipes it away with her shirtsleeve.

“You were wrong, William.” Her voice is as tired as her eyes. She sounds neither angry nor spiteful. “We  _ could _ have been beautiful had you not become a butcher.”

“You’re one yourself, Wyatt.”

Dolores laughs, gracelessly and low. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Now we’re just ugly.”

*

She kisses him again.

Just because she can.

Because she deserves someone like him over someone like Teddy.

Dolores and William were star-crossed lovers. A wonderful, unfulfilled fantasy for the novels. Wyatt and The Man in Black, in turn, make a fitting pair.

She thinks about it and kisses him a third time. Because she hates him, herself, and, most of all, this world. He’s her fitting punishment and only reward. 


End file.
